A fundamental problem of Internet traffic engineering is that of determining the bandwidth (bits/sec), or link speed, required to carry a traffic load (bits/sec) offered to a given transmission link, and to satisfy specified quality-of-service (QoS) requirements for the offered traffic. The offered load is comprised of packets of varying sizes arriving for transmission on the link. Arriving packets can queue up at an input buffer for the link, and are dropped if the queue size (in bits) is larger than the input buffer size (in bits). Exemplary QoS metrics for the arriving packets are queuing delay and packet loss.
The bandwidth required to satisfy a specified QoS requirement (hereafter sometimes referred to as the “QoS bandwidth”) depends on the queue-length process which, in turn, depends heavily on the statistical properties of the packet arrivals and sizes. These statistical properties also change as the mean connection load changes. Because of this statistical variation, the bandwidth allocation methods of the art have often produced sub-optimal bandwidth allocation.